by Pete Hamill
Cynthia Harding places the flat of her back against the papered wall at the foot of the stairs. She exhales deeply. Breathes in. Exhales again. Thinking: I want to squat down here on the floor. I’m so tired I want to bawl. There were so many things to go over, from the napkins to the coffee. Mary Lou helped as always. As always, I chose the flowers myself. Like Mrs. Dalloway.
Then she gathers energy and goes into the kitchen. The chatter stops. The radio is switched off. The two younger waiters are doubling as dishwashers, a skill not taught at acting school. The air is liquid. Odors of the meal. One Mexican dishwasher is eating. At the far end, standing before the gleaming double-doored stainless steel Bosch refrigerator, is their boss. Thirty-one, maybe, handsome in a George Hamilton way, as if practicing for a career on the Food Channel. He devised five menus, and Cynthia chose one. The billi-bi soup, thick with mussels, with zwieback-like toast made from artichoke flour. Roast of veal, in fines herbes sauce. Braised Bibb lettuce. No salad, because of time. Spanish melon with lime and ginger.
Brooke Astor would have been proud of the meal. Even though the veal was a shade overcooked. Cynthia moves into the room, begins shaking hands.
–Thank you, everybody, Cynthia says, and smiles. You were all just wonderful.
–It was marvelous to be here, the boss says. She hears a fragment of the song. He smiles a practiced half-crooked smile, showing perfect white teeth. She imagines his body, gym cut, hairless. If he’s gay, he gives no obvious signals.
–Yes, thank you, Mrs. Harding, a slim young aproned woman says. Your guests were fabulous. It was like having ten different Charlie Rose shows at the same time. So cool.
Out of sight, the chef already has the envelopes with the fee and the tips. Mary Lou took care of that too.
–Thank you, he whispers. Thank you.
Then Mary Lou Watson appears at the door. A lean black woman in her fifties. Cynthia’s secretary. Her intelligent eyes look tired and unhappy. She knows that she must lock up when everything is finished and the catering crowd heads into the rainy darkness.
–Mary Lou will let you out when you’re done, Cynthia says to the chef, then smiles and takes Mary Lou by the elbow, through the door into the hallway.
–Can’t you stay over? Cynthia says. It’s so damned late and so damned cold and it’s starting to rain and you’ve got to go all the way to Brooklyn. The guest room—
–No, she says, smiling wanly. My husband’s expecting me. The car service’ll be fine. They come five minutes after I call.
–Well, good night, dear. And many, many thanks. Again. And for everything.
–G’night.
Cynthia trudges up the stairs. She doesn’t look into the sitting room or the dining room. She remembers her nervousness addressing the guests, evoking the spirit of Brooke Astor. How Brooke had done so much for the New York Public Library, in good times and bad. How she believed with all of her immense heart in books, available to all, and believed in preserving documents and manuscripts and supporting research. Cynthia Harding didn’t mention the awful final days, when Alzheimer’s had erased her mind, while ghouls were looting her grave before she was in it. Everybody knew. They all read the papers. She didn’t mention meeting Brooke at the home of Louis Auchincloss all those years ago, dear Louis, decent, brave, witty Louis. And how she and Brooke became friends. Lunching once a month, sometimes once a week, at the Four Seasons and the Knickerbocker Club and Mortimer’s. Brooke was always impeccably dressed in a tailored suit from Oscar de la Renta or Bill Blass, a lovely, rakish hat, and, of course, white gloves.
Cynthia did tell the guests that Brooke’s great lesson was a simple one: you could be rich, and a decent citizen too. Using a modest tone to avoid sounding as if she were claiming decency for herself. Brooke was gone, she told them, but lives on at the library and many other places too. Thousands and thousands of people who never knew her name were now enjoying the bounty of Brooke Astor. In this dreadful time, libraries were more important than ever. Then the man from the library talked quickly, with precision and wit, about how to make donations, and it was over. They had raised at least one hundred thousand dollars. About half the amount of a year ago. But even young Dickie came up with a decent check.
Now she turns on the staircase, passing the portrait of a young woman by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and another by Robert Henri, of a Spanish dancer. At the landing is that landscape from Mexico, as solid as Cézanne, as moody as Corot. Painted by Lew Forrest. She wonders: Is Lew Forrest still alive? Over there at the Chelsea? She had read a brief obit a few years ago about the death of his wife, Gabrielle. Sent a card. Gabrielle was a smart, sharp woman. French. Even when Gabrielle was old and sick, alone each night in a hospice, Cynthia saw her as the lovely woman that Forrest painted when they both were young. The woman he loved for the rest of his life. Gabrielle looked down upon him from the wall of his studio at the Chelsea when Cynthia visited. She was not for sale. Must call tomorrow. If Lew Forrest is dead, I missed the news. The deskman at the Chelsea would know. There’s a portrait of Gabrielle in the lobby too. Right to the side of a Larry Rivers. Or there was. And a lovely portrait of a young Mexican woman too. I must call Lew Forrest.
On the top floor she enters the bedroom, with the dark studio beyond, her desk covered with papers, closes the door behind her, and slumps in exhaustion. A lamp glows beside the bed. The covers have been turned. She begins to undress. Laying each item on a winged chair. Books are stacked on the night table, beside the bed, a small blue jar beside them. She glances at her lean nude body in the full-length mirror. Her graying pubic hair brings a smile, but she thinks: Not bad for sixty. The same weight I carried when I was thirty. It all depends upon the lighting. But Nora Ephron is right. I have to do something about my neck…
She pulls a terrycloth robe around her, knots the belt, moves into the bathroom, and starts running a bath. She adjusts the faucets until the water is hot, but not scalding. The mirror over the sink clouds with steam. She thinks: Sam has been in this tub with me. So have a few other guys. But Sam most of all. The tub is long and narrow, long enough to stretch out, feet planted beside the taps, a hand shower there too, a Jacuzzi. All instruments of pleasure. How many times have I come in this tub? Alone, or with another? Stop. This is not a catalogue raisonné. She squeezes her breasts. Places the robe on a hook. Then slides into the water.
The heat of the water forces her into the present. She feels years peel away. Decades. She closes her eyes and soaps herself, using a thick white ridged bar that she found in Paris. Soaping armpits. Soaping toes. Feeling her bones melting away.
12:35 a.m. Lew Forrest. Room 802, Chelsea Hotel, West 23rd Street, Manhattan.
He awakes but his eyes remain closed. There is a trace of brightness in his vision so he knows he has been dreaming of Paris. Again. A walk along the river. In May. With Gabrielle, for sure, or hell, maybe alone. Birds in the budding trees. Boats. A small canvas on the easel. Yes, a clichéd dream of Paris. But he doesn’t open his eyes. A line from Gauguin comes forward: I shut my eyes in order to see.
Opening his eyes doesn’t matter anyway. Not anymore. The doctors have told him that he has 15 percent vision in his left eye, 5 percent in the other. Probably from the goddamned diabetes. All that wine. Too much whiskey. Sixty years’ worth. Häagen-Dazs too, after I stopped drinking. Packing on the pounds. He sees Gabrielle laughing, in her ironical French way. He thinks: Oh, Christ, I miss you, baby. I miss Paris too.
He listens now, hears a lone bus groaning across 23rd Street, some drunks arguing. And Camus breathing. The greatest of all dogs, for sure. Named by Gabrielle right here in this studio. She confessed two years later that she had slept with Albert Camus himself, before she knew who he was. Before she met me. And here is Camus in the studio, black, handsome, with a Lab’s deep intelligence and grace. Forrest thinks: I can see him, with my eyes shut tight. He is old now, like me. Thirteen. Ninety-one for a human. Forrest can smell Camus, because it’s true what they say: You lose y
our eyes and then you see with your nose and your ears. The dog smells old. When he needs to go down to the street he gives off a sweeter smell, like fermented farts. His good heart never changes.
Forrest opens his eyes, and Camus is ten feet away, just past the easel and the bright splashy painting it holds. Forrest can’t see him clearly but knows his hazel eyes are open, his tongue pink and loose between his teeth. Memory fills in blanks, in paintings, in life. The dog is waiting to take him on a walk. Forrest used to walk Camus. Now the dog walks him.
Soon, Camus.
Soon.
Forrest is stretched out on the ancient recliner. His hands feel the flaking imitation-leather arms of the chair. The same texture as my lower legs. A new painting is a few feet beyond his toes, all slashing reds and blacks and mauves, secure on the easel he bought after returning to New York from Paris in 1968, when he was a very different kind of painter. He doesn’t know what time it is now, since there are no clocks in the studio, and Forrest hasn’t worn a watch since 1961, when he read a remark by Picasso saying that civilization began to end with the invention of the wristwatch. He thinks: I couldn’t read a wristwatch now, anyway. Can’t see my prick, I can’t see a watch. There’s a telephone controlled by the switchboard in the lobby, but Forrest usually tells Jerry at the desk to block his calls. There is no television set here either. Forrest gave it to the young girl from ARTnews, down on the third floor. Lucy something. Jenkins? Hawkins? He could barely see the screen anymore, and listening to it was driving him mad. The verbal drivel. The slovenly language.
Sometimes that packaged noise made him want to rant on a street corner, like the old socialists on Pitkin Avenue, back in Brownsville. Rant in English. Rant in Yiddish. About the capitalist swine. The injured poor. The need for revolution. It was easier to give away the television set.
He ranted to that girl from ARTnews, who wrote an article last year about his twilight years. She laughed at the rant, his ravings about greed and gutless bloat, like Lew Forrest was the first guy ever to say such things. Then he politely asked her to keep that stuff out of the article, and she said, Sure, Mr. Forrest. Then she swerved and asked him what was the best decision he ever made. He said, Joining the army in 1943, on my eighteenth birthday. Taking the subway downtown from Music and Art and walking into the recruiting office on Whitehall Street.
–Why? Lucy said, in a surprised way.
–’Cause I lived through the war, and got the G.I. Bill, and the bill got me Paris. And my life.
He didn’t tell her about the Bulge and she didn’t ask. He figured kids her age didn’t know much about the old wars. And certainly never heard of the battles. Forrest didn’t mention that there wasn’t another person on the planet who knew about the German round that went through his right thigh and saved his life. When the medics took him away from the battle, he was happy. The Germans had given him a ticket out of the fucking war. Only Lew Forrest knew any of that.
The G.I. Bill was waiting, and the bill was everything. Not just for Lew Forrest. For millions of them. He wanted to tell her, that Lucy kid, that the bill let him say to himself that he was never going back to fucking Brownsville. The Brownsville in Brooklyn, not the one in Texas. Never going back to Saratoga and Livonia, where the wiseguys from Murder, Inc. stood outside Midnight Rose’s in their fedoras and pinkie rings, smirking at the working schmucks hurrying home from the few Depression jobs. Forrest made his vows in that hospital. He was never going back to the sour odors seeping from the cellar of their tenement. Or to his father’s silence, as he headed out each morning to cut fur, or at least try to. Or to his mother cursing Hitler, his kid brother Stanley studying and studying for the test for Brooklyn Tech. Forrest hated all that. Lew Forrest, the American son, was learning how to say to the world: Kiss my yiddishe ass. And fuck living like this. I’m going to fucking Paris.
He dreams of it still, that Paris. He still smells the oil and turpentine in the halls of the school. He still hears Ben Webster on the radio in the bistro on his corner. And Ellington. And Lady Day. He heard her sing “As Time Goes By” before he ever got to see Casablanca. He remembers the bony bodies of the women he slept with, because nobody that year was fat, and they were all desperate for a free meal in starving Paris. Or just the feel of a warm young man’s body. He made drawings of all of them. All pared down by hunger, like creatures out of Egon Schiele. But he never said any of this to the girl from ARTnews. He did tell her about his friend Buchwald.
–You mean Art Buchwald?
–Yeah, I met him at the V.A. where we were both picking up checks. He’d been a marine in the Pacific, then a student on the bill at USC. In Paris, he was broker than I was. I paid our checks in a few bistros.
–He just died, Lucy said. I mean, like a couple of years ago?
–Yes, Lew Forrest said. He was one funny son of a bitch, Mr. Buchwald. And he was from Queens, you know, from Hollis, I think, and so we got along right from the get-go. We spoke the same language. He loved asking me about the boys from Murder, Inc. and was astonished that I had seen Lepke and Gurrah, two of the worst of them. In the flesh! For Art, Brownsville was like a fabulous Jewish kingdom, the hoodlums all members of the Round Table. He had a sad side too, a mother in a nuthouse, a father who turned him and his sisters over to an orphanage. Good for your character, he said, and laughed. But there was hurt in his eyes that never really went away. No wonder.
–Then at some point he got a job at the Paris Herald, reviewing restaurants. He started taking me along. The only time I ever ate at the Tour d’Argent was with Art. And at Maxim’s too! He said, Welcome to journalism.
Lucy laughed with the shock of recognition, probably inspired by her own, fresher memories of free food at gallery openings and benefits for museums. And Forrest thought: Yes, Buchwald is dead, along with the whole lost patrol of laughing, drinking playboys of the western world who made Paris their own.
Now I’m on the way to join them, Forrest thought. I take all these goddamned pills from different-sized containers so I don’t mix them up. Metformin. Amaryl. Zocor. Benicar. For blood sugar and cholesterol and blood pressure and some other fucking thing. To ward off conditions we never heard of in Paris. And absolutely never heard of in the Bulge. What was it Buchwald told him that time when he was sick and Forrest called him in Washington? Remember one thing about being old, Buchwald said: Before you go to bed, never take a laxative and a sleeping pill at the same time.
They both laughed so hard Forrest thought they were at a table on the terrace of the Deux Magots. With the French all looking at them, because the French never laughed as hard as New Yorkers. Nobody did.
Forrest now thinks: Better get up. Swallow the fucking pills. Get taken for my walk by Camus.
He moves to the side of the recliner, twists, stands. So does the dog. Waiting with infinite patience. The routine as coded in Camus’s brain as it is in his master’s. For a long moment, Forrest stares at the painting on the easel. Remembering that first magical visit to the Louvre, and seeing Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and saying out loud: I want to do that. And how he made a life out of that ambition. Working on drawing and color and composition until his hand always did what he told it to do. A mountain or an eyelash. Loving Picasso and Matisse, but saluting older gods too, and pledging his fealty. The visiting New York dealers looked at his work and shrugged. They wanted something new. Bold, they said. Or angry. They wanted a cousin of Kline or Pollock, not Géricault. Lew Forrest wanted to make the imagined world visible. And went hungry too often, even after meeting Gabrielle.
Forrest glances down the length of the studio, past his bed, to the lighted area before the back windows. On the wall, there are two portraits he painted long ago. One was of Consuelo. The girl from Oaxaca. Again his mind fills in what he cannot see. Moody and dark, with golden skin in the morning light, voluptuous black eyes, high cheekbones, a perfectly curving nose. Consuelo, from that year in Mexico: what? Eleven years ago? Twelve? More? Ay, Consuelo.
–Excuse me, he says, in Brownsville French.
She looks up, her eyes wary and instantly focused.
–Oui?
–I would like very much to draw you, mademoiselle. In private.
She shrugs, takes an amused, indifferent drag on the cigarette. He hopes the amusement is about his bad French.
–Five francs an hour.
That afternoon she came to his tiny room, still damp with the remainders of winter. And so it began. She would be his wife, until the day she died. The portrait of Consuelo did not go on the wall until Gabrielle was gone forever.
He shuffles now into the narrow bathroom, lifts a bottle of Evian from the small fridge, unscrews the cap, then shakes out his pills, places eight of them in his mouth, and washes them down. Camus comes up beside him, his nails clicking on the hardwood floor. The big Lab knows the meaning of all sounds in this closed world. The pills are a prelude. Forrest reaches for the blue leash on its hook behind the door.
–Let’s go, my man.
He pauses to pull on sneakers, laces them, sighs, thinking: All of this is to make death easier, isn’t it? The disappearance of all the people you love. The doctor visits. The pills. The scaly flesh. The faded eyesight. The vanished dick. For every man on earth, it must always start with the dick. Erasing one huge reason to live. He laughs, and says out loud: No wonder some people choose suicide.
And thinks: For me, it’s never been an option.
I want to see how the story turns out.